This is the Guardian. It's the end-to-end encrypted messaging service that will keep your conversation secret.

Until you hand those conversations to a journalist, that is.

Tens of thousands of Matt Hancock's

WhatsApp messages sent during the pandemic

have been handed to a newspaper.

The former Health Secretary,

Matt Hancock has described the leaking of thousands of his

what'sat messages written during the height of the COVID pandemic

as a massive betrayal and breach of trust.

And as the Telegraph has drip-fed story after story over the past few days, one thing has become clear from the 100,000 messages.

There was a lot of confusion in Downing Street about what following the science actually meant.

So today we're asking what do Matt Hancock's leaked messages tell us about scientific understanding at the heart of

government and what needs to change before the next pandemic hits.

From the Guardian I'm E. sample and this is Science Weekly. Kit Yates, you're director of the Center for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath,

and you've written about what we should make of these leaked messages. Now of course they're only going to give

us a partial picture of what happened at this very chaotic time in the pandemic, but you've

been looking at the government's understanding of the maths and statistics in particular.

I wonder what strikes you about these messages overall.

Yeah, I think it's important to remember that we are only seeing a partial picture of what's emerging

from these messages, both because these messages don't cover everything, but also because we're not seeing

all of them.

But yeah, I've seen some of them which have scared me a little bit in terms of illustrating the scientific or mathematical understanding their abilities to do relatively simple mathematics.

...